Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Maggie.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: And I'm Nicole. Welcome to episode 27.
Welcome to the DAC Dyslexia and Coffee Podcast. We are so happy you could join us. We are both moms and dyslexia interventionists who want to talk about our students and children. What dyslexia is, how it affects our kids, strategies to help and topics related to other learning disabilities will also be covered in this podcast.
Parents are not alone, and we want to give a voice to the concerns and struggles we are all having. This is a safe place to learn more about how to help our children grow and succeed in school, in the world. Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the conversation.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: Hi, everybody. So we like to start our episodes with the concept of the week. The concept of the week is our opportunity as practitioners to peek behind the curtain a little bit, let you into an intervention session, and teach something that we would be teaching to one of our students. So today's concept of the week is trigraph tch.
It's generalization.
So trigraph TCH means three letters that make one sound. Right. So tch.
This rule is very similar to the digraph CK generalization. When we hear the CH sound at the end of a word right after a short vowel, we need the trigraph TCH to spell that sound. So some examples, the word crunch, C R, U, T, C H or the word stitch, S T, I, T, C H.
[00:01:48] Speaker B: So we're on episode 27.
[00:01:51] Speaker A: Wow. A lot of episodes.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: It is.
[00:01:54] Speaker A: Yay. Good for us.
[00:01:55] Speaker B: Our topic today is vocabulary and its role in reading.
So this is an episode that was also inspired by recent conversations with some of our parents.
And we also get asked, why is vocabulary important?
[00:02:14] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: So, and they also want to know, after we do one of our assessments, why are there vocabulary subtests in them?
And so basically, that's what we wanted to talk about today.
[00:02:28] Speaker A: Yeah. So vocabulary plays a very important role in the reading process and is also really, really important for reading comprehension.
[00:02:43] Speaker B: Vocabulary is learned different ways, so it can be learned through everyday experiences. With oral and written language, children can learn meanings of words when talking in conversations, and when they come across a word they do not know and they ask what the definition is.
[00:03:01] Speaker A: Yeah. It can also be learned through. Through direct instruction. So an example is that we teach students vocabulary related to, like, a social studies unit. If we were studying the Middle east, for example. Right. We're going to look at a map, we're going to learn names of places, we're going to learn items that would be commonly used there there's going to be a specific set of words that these students are going to really need to know and use to study that particular unit.
[00:03:40] Speaker B: Research shows that a student needs to encounter a word about 12 times or more before they know it well enough to help them comprehend it. And this is a report from 1985 that shows that. And that's for a typical reader.
[00:03:58] Speaker A: Yes. And that would be encountering it in a text, not just orally. Right. So they may need to encounter something orally, like they need to hear it only a few times in order to speak it. But we're really talking about that reading vocabulary. So being able to actually recognize that word for a dyslexic learner, that it's going to be way more than 12 times.
[00:04:30] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:04:31] Speaker A: Research.
Anywhere from four more times. Like, so 12 times four, or even more than that sometimes.
[00:04:46] Speaker B: So there are four different types of vocabulary, which I think is very interesting that.
[00:04:52] Speaker A: So listening vocabulary refers to the words that we need to know to understand what we hear.
It's the earliest type of vocabulary that would be developing. Right. We're developing listening vocabulary even when we're in the womb.
[00:05:13] Speaker B: And then there's speaking vocabulary. And that's the words that we use when we speak. Speak.
And that takes a little longer. Right. Usually you're a toddler when you start speaking.
[00:05:25] Speaker A: Exactly.
Yeah. So it's that bank of words that the toddler knows and can use.
Reading vocabulary are the words that we need to know to understand what we read.
[00:05:42] Speaker B: And writing vocabulary are the words we use when we are writing something. And those can be different than what we know for their reading vocabulary because we. That takes a little bit more brain power to make it come out as a written vocabulary.
[00:05:58] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. So we kind of have that receptive. Right. Like we are receiving the words when we are listening, we're receiving the words when we're reading, and then we have that expressive piece. So we're expressing vocabulary when we're speaking. Speaking. We're expressing vocabulary when we're writing.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: So vocabulary is very important when learning to read. Beginning readers use words they hear orally to understand the words they see written.
[00:06:32] Speaker A: Yes.
So if a student has not heard a word, they really cannot figure out written words in those really early reading stages, if they have not heard very simple words, they can't understand them from writing. They don't have enough phonetic rules behind them to be able to make those connections. And so they really can't figure out the word. They also won't have any idea if this is sounding Correct to them or not, they can't distinguish between a real word and a nonsense word.
[00:07:12] Speaker B: Correct.
And then readers can not understand what they're reading if they don't know what the words mean too, because they're not able to pick it up out of the context of what they're reading at that point.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: Research shows that vocabulary needs to be learned indirectly and directly for the best results.
So how do children learn meaning indirectly?
[00:07:46] Speaker B: Well, they engage in daily oral language. Right. How many times do we talk to our kids and make sure that they're listening and then repeat things back and trying to use more words with them? The more they hear, the more they can use in their vocabulary, their oral vocabulary, and that kind of builds that vocabulary up for them so that when they start to read, they'll be able to connect those words from the oral language to the reading.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. You know, that's why when my kids were itty bitty babies, right. I talked to them so much. You know, everything we were kind of doing, we would kind of narrate our day. I would, out of necessity, for myself, not to go crazy too. Let's be real.
Yes, it was all good for their vocabulary, but it was also good for my mental health.
But those hearing the adults in their life talk to them, playing lots of turn, taking games with kids, that's going to get all of those words in there and that will be part of their, you know, listening and oral language.
Another big, big way is listening to adults read to them. Reading tons of stories to your kids when they're little and even when they're a little bit bigger.
[00:09:21] Speaker B: Right. And also the child and the parent can have a discussion about what they're reading so that they can get the mean behind those vocabulary words that they don't know.
And that increases their learning new words and their meaning.
[00:09:35] Speaker A: Exactly. The words in print, too, they're going to be inherently more complex words. You're going to encounter words in reading that you're not going to encounter in your spoken daily language.
[00:09:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
And then the last way is reading students when they're able to read, reading on their own extensively. So, like, that's where they see more words, the more that they read. Right.
So that's really important so that they can continue to build those vocabulary as they grow.
[00:10:14] Speaker A: Exactly. You know, a couple episodes ago, we talked about the Matthew effect, Right. So that's that idea. It comes from the book of Matthew in the Bible that the rich become richer, the poor become poorer.
The more we expose kids to oral vocabulary and Reading vocabulary, the more they are set up for success.
Those really, truly those early kids with those pretty vast oral vocabularies going into early school that is linked to way better outcomes for reading and writing. And similarly, the more these kids are reading. That's why we do want books and hands from little on. That's why we do want lots and lots of time spent with words, both listening and in print.
That is how they're going to make those connections.
[00:11:19] Speaker B: Correct.
So the direct instruction, what does that include?
[00:11:25] Speaker A: So direct instruction means that we're not leaving things up to chance. Right. Our indirect. Those are just those incidental things. We're playing games. We're going about our life. We're reading books to kids. Direct instruction is a lot different. Direct instruction is providing students with instruction in specific words that are important to the students. Content, learning, or the understanding of a particular test text. Excuse me. So that would be like before when we were talking about if we have a social studies unit or a science unit. Right now, my first grader is talking about the community. Right. So they are. Right. Community would be a word.
[00:12:17] Speaker B: It's definitely a vocab word. Yes, Teach.
[00:12:21] Speaker A: They were talking. They would talk about what is a community.
What does that look like? They're not leaving that word up to chance. They're directly teaching that word and what it means.
Teaching students more general word learning strategies that they can apply to a variety of words. Right. That's when we can get into analyzing parts of words. One of the ways we get at that here is we talk about roots and prefixes and suffixes and the meaning.
[00:12:59] Speaker B: Of those things and how they can work together.
[00:13:04] Speaker A: Yeah. In combination. If I do know that root rupt, r u p t means to break, I could understand. Oh, erupt. Right. Interrupt, interrupting.
All those words. I can understand more words if I at least know one part of the word. Another way we get at this is explicitly teaching compound words.
If I know a meaning, you know of two of those words in isolation, when I stick them together, that also triggers more meaning and more robust vocabulary for kids.
[00:13:49] Speaker B: So, like, sunshine is a compound word. Sun, shine. You put it together. Sunshine.
[00:13:55] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:13:57] Speaker B: Another way to directly teach this is with. Before students would read a text, it would be helpful to teach them the specific words that they will see in that text, especially if there's some vocabulary words that they may never have seen. And this is really important because if they don't know what those words mean, they're not going to understand what they're. The text says.
So you're you're teaching them the meaning before they get in there and getting all the content together.
[00:14:28] Speaker A: Exactly. You're front loading them with that, and you're having them practice that word in isolation many times before you're having them encounter it in a text, especially in a situation where that word may not be a highly decodable word.
So we're making sure that they know what it means and are able to say it before they encounter it in a text.
I just want to be really clear here that that doesn't mean we want them to just memorize these words. We do want them to be able to use them and have them part of the vocabulary, but we don't want them just memorizing tons and tons of words. That's not what we mean here.
[00:15:10] Speaker B: Exactly.
Students also learn better when they encounter words often and in various contexts. So the more that a child sees, hears, and works with specific words, the better they seem to be able to learn them.
[00:15:27] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:15:30] Speaker B: And then another way to explicitly teach them is academic word lists.
[00:15:38] Speaker A: Yes. So academic word lists often are words, again, tied to content, so tied to a specific subject matter.
There too, you're going to get a lot into that morphology and word building piece, because many of our academic words come from that Latin layer of language, which just lends itself to being able to teach certain prefix roots and suffix explicitly.
And then, you know, teach those students how we build words in a pretty contained way.
[00:16:25] Speaker B: Exactly.
Another way to teach explicitly is teaching students how to use a dictionary in book form or online. Now, you know, before, when I was growing up, it was only in book form. Yeah.
But now we have to also teach them how to look up a word online and have a reputable site that would tell you the correct meaning.
[00:16:52] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:16:52] Speaker B: Right.
[00:16:53] Speaker A: It's a full brave new world, that's for sure. It was kind of funny, actually. Just last night in one of my intervention sessions, we were talking about a dictionary, and my student was like, I definitely don't have a dictionary at home. I'm pretty sure we don't even have one in our classroom. And then he looked at me and he said, do you have a dictionary at your house? And I looked back and I said, you know what? Actually, I don't. I don't have a paper dictionary at my home.
[00:17:24] Speaker B: Ooh, I must be old school, because I. I have more than one at home.
[00:17:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I do. I have a problem with books, though.
[00:17:33] Speaker A: So at a very later date, I will. I will tell you a story about a pocket dictionary that I had in my youth. I will not do this on this podcast. So stay tuned, listeners. I will tell you this story someday.
[00:17:49] Speaker B: And of course, we're back to that Morphology. Right. Explicitly teaching the definitions and parts of speech for the affixes that also dramatically enhances the student's vocabulary. What we were talking before about prefixes and suffixes and root words and what they all mean.
[00:18:08] Speaker A: Yeah. And how to use that. If the student understands, okay, that suffix ing, like I'm doing something that almost always, that's going to be a verb. So that's going to drive our sentence as we're writing and saying them, versus something with a suffix s, that's almost always going to be a noun. So understanding not only what the words mean, but also how to use them and being really explicit about that as we are teaching.
[00:18:50] Speaker B: So now we've basically been talking about how vocabulary is typically taught and exposed to students. So now we're going to jump in. How is it different with students with dyslexia?
[00:19:09] Speaker A: Yeah. So students with dyslexia, as a general rule, read less than their peers.
They may avoid reading due to fatigue or difficulty. And they really need that multisensory approach to learn vocabulary we talked about before, too. They need more exposure to words to build them up in their memory and get them on that. That nerve track that they could easily see that word, pick that word, use that word.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: Correct. And then some students have difficulty with oral language in addition to the reading, because obviously dyslexia is a language disorder. So sometimes it's connected with another oral language either, like you said earlier, receptive or expressive language can be impacted also. So either being able to take in the words and understand them or be able to say the words fast enough to use them correctly in a sentence while you're communicating with another person.
[00:20:30] Speaker A: Some of those students really have difficulty pronouncing words. And so acquiring that vocabulary and a learning the grammatical rules of language becomes pretty difficult for them if they're not really sure, too if they are hearing a word correct. Sometimes it is not necessarily a physical hearing issue, but it can be that underlying phonological awareness issue where that child isn't really perceiving the word correctly in the first place. So turning around and pronouncing that word then is quite difficult.
This can really impact the amount of words that, first of all, the child is even willing to say or use.
[00:21:18] Speaker B: Right.
[00:21:20] Speaker A: You know, that could. That could really impact that. That's also why it's a red flag for dyslexia when you have a young child mispronouncing many, many words, mixing up syllables in a longer word.
That's why that's on that dyslexia red flag list.
[00:21:38] Speaker B: Correct.
And think about if you're always pulling easier words to say, those more complicated words in your vocabulary might be lost because you're not using them as much. And as we just talked about, the repetition is very important for us to build that vocabulary.
[00:21:58] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:22:02] Speaker B: So sometimes we were kind of talking about the phonological awareness, the sounds in the language, but there's also a phonological memory component. So the memory of the speech sounds and pronunciations. So, like, of our labels, which really are our letter names. Right. Those are our labels of what we're talking about. So parts of the words or entire words can kind of be lost in that memory aspect.
Phonological retrieval.
That's the word and name retrieval that can be impacted.
[00:22:46] Speaker A: Yeah, those are those students that have trouble coming up with the word. You could watch these students. You are looking that in the eyeballs, and they are just scanning and scanning and scanning their brain, and they know what they want to say, but they just can't retrieve it. Or every time they do, it's the wrong word.
[00:23:11] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:23:11] Speaker A: Like, they'll do a lot of kind of transposing.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:23:15] Speaker A: Either words or many times it's like a name of a letter or a letter sound. They'll look at a label or a grapheme, and every time they look at it, they say the wrong sound. It isn't necessarily that they don't know it. They do, but it. That path to the correct file is just not. It's not strong enough.
[00:23:41] Speaker B: Right.
And then phonological production, which, you know, pronunciation, multisyllable words and phonologically complex words like aluminum specific, those are really hard.
And if you don't have all the sounds, like, right there in your brain, those are words that is not going to come out the correct way.
[00:24:12] Speaker A: Yep, yep.
So oral language impairments also place children at risk for difficulties in reading and comprehension.
That's really because that oral language is the foundation for written language and a limited vocabulary and. Or problems with morphology. The meaning or the syntax, the usage can really cause difficulties in deriving meaning from written text.
So all of these things definitely impact the reading process.
And we do teach vocabulary here in the office. So vocabulary instruction is part of the structured literacy approach.
I do think there is a little bit of a misunderstanding here. I think sometimes people, when they hear and are not familiar with the term science of reading or structured literacy, the first thing that Comes to a lot of people's mind is phonics and just that and just phonics.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: And it's so much more than that.
[00:25:32] Speaker A: It is so much more than that. Yes. The tasks that we do are phonics based. Yes.
We must address those underlining rules first. Yes. But that does not mean what we do does not relate to vocabulary or comprehension or fluency, all of those other extremely important pillars of literacy. There's also a lot of ways that we build in vocabulary instruction right along side our phonics instruction.
[00:26:17] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:26:19] Speaker A: Even if we're reading words in isolation.
Right. So even words just on a word list.
[00:26:26] Speaker B: Sometimes I just ask my students, do you know what this one means? And some very surprising. The answer is no. A lot of times. And sometimes it can be a really easy word that you would expect them to know, like a CVC word, and they have no idea what that means. And so what do we do? We discuss the meaning. We use it in a sentence. Then I usually come back to it in other lessons, make sure it becomes part of our review.
[00:27:03] Speaker A: So some factors that we take in mind. Right. We are not going to explicitly teach every single word on our word list.
Ideally. We're really not. We're not doing that. We might pick two or three on a word list of 20 to explicitly teach to our students, and then the expectation is not, after that single use, that they are. That they absolutely know what that word means.
But there are some other words that I would want my students explicitly to know and understand.
Some kind of factors in that decision. Right. If I'm looking at a passage or I'm looking at a word list and I am checking it for what do I think the student really needs to know.
One of the first things I'm thinking about is how common is this word?
[00:28:08] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:28:10] Speaker A: You know, if this word is a very common word that is used frequently, then I do want my student to know it, and I do know. And I do want them to understand how it is used and be proficient with that word.
[00:28:29] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:28:30] Speaker A: You know, another thing I might keep in mind is what is this student in front of me? What are they interested in? Mm.
I teach a lot of older boys.
It just kind of seems to be that's the way it is.
And many, not all, are very interested in mechanics, how things work.
Many of my students have a, like, engineering brain, which is not surprising because many dyslexic learners have that engineering kind of brain.
[00:29:13] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:29:13] Speaker A: So explicitly teaching words that have to do with an area that they are interested in.
Is a really good entry point.
I am going to first pick words that follow our phonetic rules because now I'm doing two things at once.
But I. I might need to expand my mind a bit as to what I would consider, like an irregular word. And sometimes I would be teaching those irregular words or maybe a word that follows the rules, but it's a later rule. I might need to stick that in earlier for some of my students.
[00:30:00] Speaker B: Right. And also depends to their ages. Right. That we. We do all ages here. So sometimes, you know that buy in is needed. Sometimes more.
[00:30:11] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:30:12] Speaker B: For certain ages than others. And so that makes sense that you would use that. So. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great example of how we use it in our lesson planning.
[00:30:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:28] Speaker B: So, Maggie, what's going on beyond dyslexia?
[00:30:31] Speaker A: Oh, my goodness.
So we've discussed in previous episodes. Right. That it is, as we record this, the tail end of February. It has been a long stretch, and we had some beautiful weather this week. And I was very happy. It was my birthday this past Tuesday, as we record this. And it was a gorgeous day, everybody. The sun was out. It was like 50 degrees, which is primo for February. That's about as best as we can ever expect in the state of Wisconsin for February. Right. It's a little muddy. I would prefer my children be able to go outside and, like, not be slimy mud balls when they come inside. But I will take what I can get and I will not complain about it. It's a little cloudy today, but it's still warm. But I had sunshine on my birthday this year, and I never get that. Friends. I don't.
What's going on with you, Nicole?
[00:31:43] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I mean, I think my topic was also about spring and how. Well, I've just decided it's spring. I don't. I. It's technically not. But you know what? I don't care. I loved it.
[00:31:58] Speaker A: I do this every year where I declare it is spring, like, the first nice day. And I, like, boycott wearing a coat. And I want to. It. It's every year. And everybody just kind of rolls their eyes at me because they're like, but you're cold. I can visibly see your gold.
[00:32:18] Speaker B: Yeah. My only complaint about spring, I love spring. So it's my favorite season. But is when the dogs come in after being in the mud.
[00:32:27] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:32:28] Speaker B: That is, like, the worst part.
[00:32:30] Speaker A: The mud.
[00:32:31] Speaker B: The mud.
[00:32:32] Speaker A: The mud. The ground is especially squishy right now, too.
[00:32:36] Speaker B: It is? Yes. Because we just had a whole bunch of snow melt in one day. So, yeah, it's pretty squishy.
[00:32:42] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:32:43] Speaker B: So. Well, thank you for listening today.
[00:32:47] Speaker A: And if you like our show, please follow us on social media and reach out if you have any questions. And especially if you want us to discuss a topic, please be sure to give us a rating and review on your favorite podcast player. This is how we really reach more listeners and that's how we get to help more families. So thank you for listening.
[00:33:08] Speaker B: Thank you.
